Book Image

Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1

By : Ty Audronis
Book Image

Designing Purpose-Built Drones for Ardupilot Pixhawk 2.1

By: Ty Audronis

Overview of this book

The Ardupilot platform is an application ecosystem that encompasses various OS projects for drone programming, flight control, and advanced functionalities.The Ardupilot platform supports many Comms and APIs, such as DroneKit, ROS, and MAVLink. It unites OS drone projects to provide a common codebase. With the help of this book, you will have the satisfaction of building a drone from scratch and exploring its many recreational uses (aerial photography, playing, aerial surveillance, and so on). This book helps individuals and communities build powerful UAVs for both personal and commercial purposes. You will learn to unleash the Ardupilot technology for building, monitoring, and controlling your drones.This is a step-by-step guide covering practical examples and instructions for assembling a drone, building ground control unit using microcontrollers, QgroundControl, and MissionPlanner. You can further build robotic applications on your drone utilizing critical software libraries and tools from the ROS framework. With the help of DroneKit and MAVLink (for reliable communication), you can customize applications via cloud and mobile to interact with your UAV.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 3. A Drone for Hunters – Autonomous Duck Decoy

A water rover is really no different than setting up a land rover drone; with one serious exception—water + electronics = bad... really bad. So, special attention needs to be paid to the waterproofing of your drone. In this regard, some special techniques, materials, and mechanics need to be employed to keep water out, keep your drone upright, and keep it alive while floating in an environment that completely destroys electronics.

In this chapter, we'll be wrapping up some of our manufacturing techniques, as well as getting a bit more into Pixhawk. But mostly, we'll show you how similar a boat is to a rover. We'll be covering:

  • Coming up with ideas for drones
  • Making your ideas marketable
  • More on manufacturing and fabrication
  • Foresight of design challenges
  • The design workflow
  • Waterproofing

Let's start with, "Why a duck decoy?" After all, doesn't that seem like a waste of Pixhawk? Isn't Pixhawk used for huge prototype medical drones? Isn't Pixhawk...